Nooooo! Not BOOBIES!!

Jocelyn Noveck of the AP has a great story on women and their reaction to this seemingly innocuous and wholesome magazine cover featuring a nursing infant.

A quarter of responses to the cover were negative, calling the photo - a baby and part of a woman's breast, in profile - inappropriate.

One mother who didn't like the cover explains she was concerned about her 13-year-old son seeing it. "I shredded it," said Gayle Ash, of Belton, Texas, in a telephone interview. "A breast is a breast - it's a sexual thing. He didn't need to see that."

It's the same reason that Ash, 41, who nursed all three of her children, is cautious about breast-feeding in public - a subject of enormous debate among women, which has even spawned a new term: "lactivists," meaning those who advocate for a woman's right to nurse wherever she needs to.

"I'm totally supportive of it - I just don't like the flashing," she says. "I don't want my son or husband to accidentally see a breast they didn't want to see."

She seems a little too concerned with "protecting" the men in her family from the sight of breasts (I'm sure they're grateful). In fact, I would have liked to have seen more (any) men quoted in the story.

I fail to understand how the sight of a nursing baby could construed as "gross," but no fewer than three women in the story apparently think so. Can anyone explain this to me? Do these women just hate their bodies or what?

World's biggest camera takes world's biggest picture

Via PDN Online:

Photographers in southern California have created the world's largest photograph using an airplane hangar as a giant camera obscura.

The core group working on the photo included Burchfield, Mark Chamberlain, Rob Johnson, Jacques Garnier, Douglas McCulloh and Clayton Spada. Together, they are working on The Legacy Project, a years-long photographic effort to document the Marine Corps Air Station El Toro in southern California. The abandoned air station is the future site of a large municipal park called the Orange County Great Park.

The image is pretty murky, but apparently you can make out some of the features of the runway... They'll get in Guinness for this one for sure.

Hang in there, Bob

We're all pulling for you...

Feed Your Head

My lack of productivity lately can be summed up in three evil little words: "Sub with Bloglines."

If you don’t use the Bloglines RSS aggregator software, you have no idea what I’m talking about. And I almost don’t want to tell you, lest you be sucked in as well.

Bloglines is one program of many for reading blogs or news sites that have syndicated feeds. So every time anyone posts something to their blog, it shows up.

And the Sub with Bloglines button, pasted into the toolbar of your Web browser, lets you subscribe to a site with a feed whenever you see anything remotely interesting.

This is bad because it causes you to keep blithely adding feeds. And given enough feeds, you could literally sit there all damn day and just read what everybody’s writing in real time.

I mean come on – they’re so tempting! From a letter to Cary Tennis on Salon.com: “A grad student in China has taken possession of my soul. I know it sounds crazy, but should I leave my wife?” How could you NOT keep reading? Then of course you have to read the reader responses in addition to Cary’s... (OK, maybe YOU don’t. I obviously have issues.)

Subscribing to so many feeds allows you to monitor what everybody’s saying all the time – which is actually quite dangerous. It means you, yourself, never have to really think about what you are doing or thinking.

Well, time to get back to work… as long as I can keep from hitting “Refresh”…

Manufacturing controversy

What is with this headline and subhead from the Detroit Free Press? This is how they frame their story on the approval of a vaccine for human papillomavirus (HPV), which causes cervical cancer:

Should girls get shots for virus at 9? Some worry vaccination may encourage early sexual activity

Though the article itself is more balanced, it does give the impression that a lot of parents feel like Angie Smith, who says, "Me personally, I would not take my child. For some parents, if you take your child to get that vaccine, it's like saying sex is OK." How's that again?

Fortunately, the accompanying poll shows that the vast majority of parents (at least, those who take online polls) agree with Gwen Scales: "I don't see how administering a vaccination for chicken pox would make my daughter want to expose herself to chicken pox." (Right on Gwen!) In answer to the question "Would you allow your daughter to get vaccine [sic] that protects against a virus that causes most cases of cervical cancer?", 87% of respondents said yes.